Breathing easy: Korean-Canadian toddler receives bioengineered windpipe

An adorable Korean-Canadian toddler has made history as the youngest person ever to receive a bioengineered organ.

Hannah Warren, almost 3, was born without a trachea, a rare congenital defect that is typically fatal. Since birth, she has been living in an intensive care ward in a Seoul, South Korea, hospital.

She could not eat, speak or smell.

Doctors kept her alive with a tube inserted into her mouth. Even with a proposed surgical procedure, Hannah's life expectancy was just six years.

"We were in shock," Newfoundland native Darryl Warren, Hannah's father tells the Toronto Star. "We didn’t want Hannah for six years. We wanted her for the rest of our lives."

Warren moved to South Korea to teach more than a decade ago. There he met his wife, Young-Mi. They also have a 4-year-old daughter, Dana.

The Warrens immediately started researching a better solution: A synthetic trachea.

The determined parents' search led them to Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, an Italian regenerative medicine specialist who had performed the world's only bioengineered windpipe transplants on adults.

Clinging to the hope Macchiarini could help them, the Warrens launched a fundraising website called "Help Hannah Breathe."

"The bioengineered synthetic scaffold will be grown using absorbable fibers and stem cells from Hannah’s bone marrow will be seeded onto the scaffold. This will minimize the chance of her immune system rejecting the transplant because the transplanted trachea will exactly match her DNA," Warren writes of the lifesaving surgery. "This life-saving surgery will enable her to breathe normally and live a long and healthy life."

Hannah would be the first child in the world to receive a bio-artificial trachea made from her own stem cells.

"When it comes to children, it's different," Macchiarini tells TODAY. "It's very hard, very hard."

The Warrens raised more than $35,000.

As the family raised the funds for the surgery, Dr. Mark Holterman, a paediatric surgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Illinois, heard Hannah’s story while on a business trip in Korea.

He immediately offered to help.

Holterman and Children's Hospital chief surgeon Dr. Richard Pearl arranged to bring Dr. Macchiarini to Illinois to help perform the surgery — at no cost to the family.

On April 9, Hannah went in for the 9-hour surgery in which her new windpipe — the Associated Press likens its size to that of a "3-inch tube of penne pasta" — was implanted.

The surgery was successful.

And since the device was created from her own stem cells, Hannah's body is unlikely to reject the transplant.

"Words cannot express our thanks to everyone who has helped make this dream a reality," Warren says in a statement released by the hospital.

"This is the page-turning in science," Pearl tells TODAY of the groundbreaking surgery. "This like the first organ transplant. This is like penicillin."

"This is a little girl who was a prisoner and now she has a chance that she’s going to have a relatively normal life," says Holterman.

Doctors put the toddler on a ventilator to help her as she adjusts to breathing on her own. And while she can't yet speak, the little girl can smell and taste for the first time.

"Lately it's just been kind of fun kind of watching her to learn how to live without a tube hanging out of her mouth. So now her lips are together she's learning about her environment with two new senses, before she never tasted and she never smelled," Holterman tells CBS News.

Her first taste? A chocolate lollipop.

"She was very lucky," Warren laughs. "Most babies experience only mashed up vegetables, peas and carrots."

While recovery will still take some time, Hannah's parents are excited to finally bring their daughter home in the next few months — first to Korea, and eventually to the Maritimes where they hope to relocate.

"We can’t wait to take her home," Warren says. "It will feel right. It will feel healthy. It will feel normal. We haven’t been able to feel right, healthy or normal since before she was born."

Holterman hopes Hannah's story offers hope to other families dealing with life-threatening birth defects:

"Sometimes we don't have any way of fixing those birth defects or ways we fix the birth defects that aren't ideal, so if we can create new structures, new organs using regenerative medicine, than we can fix a lot of birth defects," Holterman says. "This is the first step of doing this in children. The hope is down the road, we'll be able to replace an esophagus or a diaphragm."

"For her to be a pioneer, a driving force for this to happen, it's really cool," Warren says. "That's my girl."

Hannah will likely need a new windpipe in five years or so, to accommodate her growing body.

According to the Associated Press, about one in 50,000 children worldwide are born with the windpipe defect.